Tripping on the Color Line
Subtitle: Black-White Multiracial Families in a Racially Divided World
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: December 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 200
ISBN-13: 9780813528434
Subjects: Sociology - Marriage & Family; Social conditions; Race relations; Social Science; Sociology; United States; Minority Studies - Race Relations; Family & relationships; Multicultural studies; USA; Ethnic Studies - General; Interracial marriage; Racially mixed children
First sentence: The closer individuals live to the color line and the more disadvantaged they are by it, the more they find themselves reflecting on and reformulating racial thinking.
Description: Through in-depth interviews with individuals from black-white multiracial families, and insightful sociological analysis, Heather M. Dalmage examines the challenges faced by people living in such families and explores how their experiences demonstrate the need for rethinking race in America. She examines the lived reality of race in the ways multiracial family members construct and describe their own identities and sense of community and politics. She shows how people whose own very lives complicate the idea of the color line must continually negotiate and contest it in order not to reproduce it. Their lack of language to describe their multiracial existence, along with their experience of coping with racial ambiguity and with institutional demands to conform to a racially divided, racist system is the central theme of Tripping on the Color Line. By connecting the stories to specific issues, such as census categories, transracial adoption, intermarriage, as well as the many social responses to violations of the color line, Dalmage raises the debate to a broad discussion on racial essentialism and social justice.